Main Line Driver's Ed Program Exceeds Founder's Expectations

When Meg Kramer used to take her young daughters to their dance classes at a studio, she couldn’t help but notice a driver training facility there.

“Look at how much money we spend to watch our kids dance across a stage,” Kramer thought. “The most dangerous thing they’re going to do is drive a car.”

Several thousand teens die each year in car accidents and more than 350,000 teens a year are seriously injured in car crashes, Kramer said.

“We need to make sure our teens don’t end up in this number,” said Kramer, whose daughters are now 13 and 15. “We need to change our attitude and how we approach training.”

She felt her time and effort would be best spent making sure her daughters would have access to a driving program that was effective, comprehensive and professional—by developing that program herself.

So Kramer quit her job in the pharmaceutical industry and four years ago founded the Bryn Mawr-based , which earlier this month opened a location in Haddonfield, N.J.

The driving instructors are all local, off-duty police officers, and in addition to driving lessons in Subaru cars the program includes classroom instruction, games, activities, driving simulation experiences and field trips—for example, to the Lower Merion Police Department to see how DUI arrests are processed and to nearby courthouses to see how traffic citations are dealt with.

“Police officers have a lot of credibility with teens,” Kramer said. “They’re open to listening to them as a role model.”

The officers wear plain clothes while they’re teaching, and while they’re driving with students they can point to places around town and say things like, ‘yesterday, there was an accident here, and here’s why.’ ”

John Tucci, who is a Lower Merion police officer, is a driving instructor at StreetSafe and said the response to the program has been positive. Their police background, including Emergency Vehicle Operators Course (EVOC) training, gives them a lot of experience other driving instructors might not have.

“We go through a lot of driving for our police jobs,” Tucci said. “One of the things we take from our training is an obvious knowledge of vehicle codes.”

The other thing Tucci said makes sense is the officers’ vested interested in the safety of local community members.

“This industry has been unchanged for so many years,” Tucci said. “The better job we do training [teens], the fewer citations and accidents we have to deal with—that was an angle I hadn’t even thought of. “

Kramer said parents are involved in the process, too, getting tips from their kids’ driving instructors and learning what they can do to keep their teen drivers safe.

“When they hear us say it, they can’t get mad at their parents,” Kramer said. 

She emphasized that the attitude kids have in their driving instruction is the same attitude they’re going to take with them behind the wheel, and said driving instruction has remained the same for decades while driving itself has become more dangerous.

Kramer stressed the importance of “proactive driving” rather than defensive driving and said that scaring teenagers into making good driving decisions doesn’t work because the teen brain is inclined to believe that it’s “not going to happen to me.”

“Our whole goal is, we want to change the expectations of driver training,” Kramer said. “A lot of parents don’t expect much from it.” 

And Kramer’s daughters?

“I think they’re proud of me,” she said. “I turned it into something real.”